Blog

Social Media and Pharmacovigilance: Six Studies That Show What’s Possible

Posted March 30, 2016

The evidence of social media’s ability to enhance pharmacovigilance methods and processes continues to mount, as demonstrated by the following six studies.

1. “The quantity and near-instantaneous nature of social media provides potential opportunities for real-time monitoring of ADRs, greater capture of ADR reports and expedited signal detection if utilised correctly. “Social media and Pharmacovigilance: A review of the opportunities and challenges,” British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology, October 2015

2. “Our review suggests that interest in the utilization of the vast amounts of available social media data for ADR monitoring is increasing. In terms of sources, both health-related and general social media data have been used for ADR detection—while health-related sources tend to contain higher proportions of relevant data, the volume of data from general social media websites is significantly higher. There is still very limited amount of annotated data publicly available and, as indicated by the promising results obtained by recent supervised learning approaches, there is a strong need to make such data available to the research community.” “Utilizing social media data for Pharmacovigilance: A review,” Journal of Biomedical Informatics, April 2015

3. “Over a six-month period, researchers collected 6.9 million tweets by searching public Twitter for keywords related to the drugs, then randomly chose 61,000 of those tweets to manually analyze. Out of those, 4,400 were identified as adverse events. In the same time period, there were just 1,400 events related to those drugs reported to the FDA through normal channels.” “Digital Drug Safety Surveillance: Monitoring Pharmaceutical Products in Twitter,” Drug Safety, May 2014

4. “Recognizing the importance of drug safety surveillance, research into the identification, extraction, and detection of adverse drug events has steadily grown in the past decade. At the same time, social networks and patient forums on the Internet have emerged. Patient social media cover a large and diverse population and contain millions of unsolicited and uncensored discussions about medications… In particular, patient reports of adverse drug events in social media are more sensitive to underlying changes in patients’ functional status than clinical and spontaneous reports. Thus, analyzing patient reports of adverse drug events in health social media may add value to current practice of pharmacovigilance by providing new perspectives for understanding drug effectiveness and side effects timely” “Identifying Adverse Drug Events from Patient Social Media: A Case Study for Diabetes,” Purdue Krannert School of Management, January 2015

5. “We have shown that people do tweet about their adverse effects experiences with their prescription drug use. In these tweets, they mention the drug name, along with the adverse effect(s), making it possible to automatically extract the drug and adverse effect relationship.” “Pharmacovigilance on Twitter? Mining Tweets for Adverse Drug Reactions,” AMIA Annual Symposium Proceedings, November 2014

6. “Taking into account the large number of mentions that we found in a relatively short period of time, we believe that a promising application of social media platforms and in particular Twitter is to use them as tools for the detection, understanding and monitoring the way people manage prescribed drugs. Notably, people use Twitter to share and discuss feelings, expectations and opinions about their own health and about prescribed treatments they received more often than expected. This wealth of information could be used as a novel means for drug safety monitoring in parallel with conventional Pharmacovigilance reporting and surveillance systems.” “Exploring Brand-Name Drug Mentions on Twitter for Pharmacovigilance” PubMed: Studies in Health Technology and Informatics